Establishing Concrete Web Presence

Guest Author - June Kaminski

STEP ONE

DOMAIN REGISTRATION

The first step in setting up any website involves choosing a domain name (e.g. The domain name for the Nursing Informatics Learning Center is nursing-informatics.com Some websites are added to an existing organizational or company website that already has a domain. For instance, if I chose to add a website to the organization, Kwantlen University College's website it would be added to the domain, kwantlen.ca If you need to purchase a domain, here are the steps to follow:

Go to a reputable domain service to initiate the purchase of your domain (which averages about 9 to 10 dollars per year). Then check to see if the domain you want is available (You can choose from various suffixes e.g. .com, .net, .org, .us, .ca, and so on)

STEP TWO

WEB HOSTING SERVICE

The second step involves finding a comfortable, reliable space to actually install your web site. Again, if you are adding to an existing organizational or company web site, this step will have already been taken care of. But, if you are creating your site from scratch, you will need to find a place to store and exhibit your web site. There are a few points to consider when choosing which web hosting service to use.

Amount of space included in your package- if you intend to create a site that is chock full of documents, multimedia, and other amply sized files, you will need much more space than a site that is mostly text based information.

Reliable service with very little downtime – you want your visitors to be able to find your site at any time of day, without service outages

Easy to access technical support where on-line as well as phone access to service support staff is available around the clock. They should also offer on-line “help” documents to guide you through setup, etc.

Reasonable monthly or annual fee for service (this can vary widely)

Availability of support infrastructure and interactive programs, such as mailing lists, polls, course management software, project management programs, statistical software, forums and discussion list capabilities, conducive to inclusion of multimedia files and so on

STEP THREE

NAME SERVERS

Once you have established your web hosting service, you will be given two name servers to add to your domain registration control area. This will point your domain to your actual web space provider account. The name servers will look something like this: NS1.HYGEIA-DESIGN.COM and NS2.HYGEIA-DESIGN.COM

DESIGNING YOUR SITE

Now that you have your domain set up within your web space hosting site, you are ready to begin the actual planning and design of your site. Again, if you are adding your pages to an existing organizational web site, you can jump directly to this step without having to register a domain or purchase web space.

CHECKLIST FOR ESTABLISHING CONCRETE WEB PRESENCE

Complete the following checklist to ensure that you are set up to begin to design your site:

1.Domain Registration:

Service used to register domain: __________________________
Domain Name selected: __________________________